


The Only Way Out is Through

by runsinthefamily



Series: Purgatory [18]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Purgatory, the way out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-05
Updated: 2014-04-05
Packaged: 2018-01-14 21:29:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1279537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/runsinthefamily/pseuds/runsinthefamily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>
  <img/>
</p><p> Pic from Europress Photo Agency</p>
    </blockquote>





	The Only Way Out is Through

**Author's Note:**

>  Pic from Europress Photo Agency

"Son of a bitch," Dean says. He tries to step forward and Cas' hand tightens on his shoulder, whether for support or in defense he can't tell.

"Not much of a scuttlebutt down here," says Dick, with a little ironic tilt of his head. "No water coolers, as you can see! But that doesn't mean I don't have my ear to the ground. Literally," he adds, that grin of his stretching wider. "I heard you, Castiel," Dick says. "Heard you in the bones of purgatory. You cut quite a swathe, you and your human."

 _ **What do you want?**_ Cas asks. 

"To make a deal, of course," says Dick. 

"Fuck you," Dean says.

"Not a promising start to negotiations," says Dick. "Let me make a counter offer." 

His transition from smarmy motherfucker into twelve foot tall oil slick horror show is abrupt, and Dean is only just tensing his muscles to dodge when Dick is _there_ in front of them, one sledgehammer fist descending. The concussion throws Dean into the air and he lands in a sprawl some twenty feet away, blood in his mouth, a shooting pain in his ribs he's intimately familiar with. Dean rolls to his feet, hoping he doesn't end up with bone splinters in a lung, and jerks out his knife.

Dick has Cas by both wrists, forcing him to his knees. The angel blade lies abandoned to one side, the tip stained black. Cas is straining, Grace flowing down his side in rivulets from his stump, wings beating the air. It's of no use. Dick pushes him backward, bending his spine in a painful arc. "Castiel," he hisses out of a toothy, black-hole mouth. "My old doorman. You're a bit tall for the job at the moment."

Cas screams. 

Dean flings himself forward without thinking and manages three slices - hamstrings, kidneys, back of the neck, each closing like water behind the blade - before Dick lets go of one of Cas's wrists and casually backhands Dean. He hits a rock this time and the world goes red and black. _Get up. If you can stand, you can fight. If you can fight, you can win. Get up or die._ Somewhere far away, Cas screams again. _Get up or Cas dies._

Dean gets his arms under him. There's blood in his eyes, stinging, but he can see Dick and Cas. Dick looms over him, grown even more massive - wait, no, Cas is _shrinking_ somehow, changing, his limbs grown shorter and pinker, the ram's head vanishing. And he goes on screaming, his Voice fading into human tones, ever more tortured. 

"Stop," Dean slurs. "Stop it!" He stumbles forward. "Cas!"

Dick casts Cas, human shaped, away like a toy he is bored with and is suddenly back in the suit and the corporate haircut, adjusting the cuffs of his shirt. "Never could keep a leash on your dog, could you, angel?" He grabs Dean by the throat, lifts him off the ground. "Now. Let's start with some motivation." 

He breaks Dean's left wrist with an easy twist and Dean can't help the gasp that escapes his constricted airway.

Cas struggles to one knee. "Stop," he says. His voice is like ten miles of bad road. One eye is swollen shut and blood runs down that side of his face in a sheet. "What do you _want_?"

"I'm going to let you go," Dick says. "I'm going to let you walk right out of here, just like you want. Sorry about the downsizing. Gotta have that nice fleshy envelope if you want to fit through the slot." He champs his teeth a couple of times. 

"Dean -"

"Oh, no no, Castiel," Dick says cheerily. He shakes Dean a little. "He's my collateral. See, when you get back topside, you're going to open that door again. That nice, big door, the one without all that pesky small print about who can use it. And when I come on through, I'll bring you your cute little human pet." He spread his free hand. "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours."

"I'll scratch your fucking back, you piece of shit," Dean spits, clutching at Dick's wrist with his one working hand.

"I am not leaving Dean with you," says Cas. He staggers upright. 

"Have to tell you, you are not negotiating from a place of strength," says Dick, all faux sympathy. His hand tightens on Dean's neck. "But I'm not unreasonable. I could send you off with a keepsake. How about his tongue?"

"He won't survive here," Cas says. "He'll die without me. Send him instead and I will stay."

"C's! Nn," Dean manages. 

"Oh, don't worry about that," Dick says genially. "I can keep him kicking. Indefinitely."

 _I'll show you kicking, you son of bitch,_ Dean thinks, as his vision fills with exploding black flowers. He expends the last of his oxygen in a jackknifing heave and boots Dick in the side of the face. He doesn't quite make it - the sole of his right boot just barely brushes Dick's cheekbone. On the way down, though, it bounces off the end of the holy femur lodged in Dick's esophagus. 

Dick screeches like a million fingernails on the universe's largest chalkboard and throws Dean away, _again._ This time, however, Dean collides not with the ground but with Cas, who catches him in weak, trembling, human arms and goes tumbling down with Dean's weight landing solidly in his stomach. He wheezes in Dean's ear but holds on tight. They sprawl there in the dust for a moment, gasping, while Dick goes on making that godawful noise, flailing like an injured spider.

"Get up," Cas says, shoving at Dean. 

One hand lands right on Dean's busted rib. "Fuck!" He rolls off Cas, wavers upright as Cas does the same. His head feels about to explode. The dead dry bottom of the Leviathan's empty sea swims in his vision.

"The bone," says Cas. His eyes stutter white light for a moment and then fade to human blue.

"Yeah, great. Good," says Dean. "How do we get to it? I'm half dead and you're - Cas, what did he do to you?"

"Distract him." says Cas, and then falls to one knee.

"Cas!" 

Twenty feet away, Dick stops his anguished stagger-dance and straightens. His face is hardly there anymore, his eyes tiny pinpricks, his mouth a nightmare gash that bisects his head. Black ooze seeps where the bone enters and exits his neck. "That hurrrrrrrrrrrrt," he says. His voice buzzes and clicks. "You filthy little prrrrrrrrrrotozoa."

"Good," Dean says, stepping sideways away from Cas. Distraction. He can hardly keep his feet, has to keep blinking to focus. His knife is just plain gone, not that it was much use to begin with. But his mouth still works and that was one thing he never had any trouble running, regardless of the condition the rest of him was in. "As much as when I stuck it in you the first time?"

"I'm going to eat yourrrrr tongue, little animal," Dick says. His shoulders get lumpy and dark, his arms stretch. Horrifying as the shutter-blink of his previous transformation was, it didn't hold a candle to this slow bloating, his skin going dark and sticky, legs and belly sliding gloppily out of the fabric of his suit. The bone is barely visible, an ivory toothpick jutting out below the murky grey rows of teeth.

"Come and get it," Dean says, as his ribs scream and his head screams and his broken wrist sobs. He's empty handed. The last fading remnant of Lightbulb heats his chest, uselessly. "Come and get it, Exxon." He half-trips over a rock in his sidle away from where Cas is now leaning on one hand against the dirt. They're going to die here.

Dick advances on him, slow and deliberate. "I'll keep you inside me, I think," he says. It's barely intelligible, his mouth is so deformed. "Inside, in the dark." His jaws gape, impossibly wide. He could swallow Dean whole. He could swallow the world. 

Dean gives him the finger.

Light blossoms, blue-white and actinic, accompanied by the sonic boom of angelic wings and Cas' angular, eggshell pale fingers wrap around the lump that is Dick's head. They flex, straining, and Dick is yanked backwards, the impossible gel-flesh of his body bending, the thresher maw of his mouth pointing toward the sky. Cas' mask face appears over his shoulder, expressionless but for the narrowing of his glowing eyes, but Dean can practically see the bared teeth he'd be sporting on a human face, that weird grimace Cas always made when he fought. 

_This dumb move again?_ Dean thinks, elated, and then takes three running steps and launches himself. He hits the tar-baby surface of Dick's chest with a wet squelch. The stink of eons envelops him, his body sinks into fetid heat, but he flails his right hand up, digging his knees into yielding, rubbery awfulness for leverage. He closes his hand around the end of Sister Mary Constant's femur. Yanks. 

Black ooze fountains out as the bone comes free in Dean's grip and Dick bellows and heaves like an earthquake. He rips his head free from Cas' grip and then his mouth is coming down at Dean, a tunnel of teeth like a mirror maze in a fun house, just teeth, ravening sharp teeth repeating into infinity. Dean hooks the bone forward, drives the point in just behind the first row, and then lets his weight drop. 

There is a brief moment of resistance and then Dick opens like a zipper. The bone drags through his non-flesh as Dean slides downward. It makes a noise like - like nothing Dean's vocabulary or life experience equips him to describe. It makes the noise of a Leviathan being torn asunder. There is blackness. There is nothing but blackness, exploding outward, wet, hot darkness enveloping every part of Dean's body and every sense he possesses rebels against what they are being forced to endure. Dean isn't sure whether he is killing Dick or being eaten by him, he just knows wants it to end. 

Eventually, it does.


End file.
